Bad Guys Read online

  He put the phone away, turned the ignition, and the Buick rattled to life. I just looked at him, waiting.

  “Nothing’s going to happen here tonight,” he said to me. “But Miles got a little action.”

  Lawrence put the car into drive, swung the car across Garvin so we were headed in the other direction, and drove a lot faster than that car had any business going.

  We rounded the corner onto Emmett, a short but trendy street with several ritzy stores, including a jeweler’s, a shoe store, a place that sold rare art books, a couple of high-end ladies’-wear places, and one storefront that was nothing but shattered glass and splintered wood. Above what used to be the window was the name Maxwell’s.

  There were three black-and-white police cars, and a couple more unmarked cruisers with their trademark tiny hubcaps, plus an ambulance, but the attendants weren’t doing any rushing around. Most of the attention seemed to be focused on something in the middle of the street.

  Lawrence pulled the Buick up onto the sidewalk about a hundred feet back, and we both got out. A uniformed officer approached Lawrence, raising his hand up flat to press against his chest and keep him away from the scene, but before he could touch him Lawrence said, with some authority, “Where’s Steve Trimble?”

  “Over there,” the cop said, lowering his hand and using it to point.

  A tall white guy with short dark hair, glasses, and a pencil-thin mustache, who was kneeling over the facedown body of a man a few steps away from the curb, glanced our way and got to his feet. He and Lawrence approached each other with an uncomfortable familiarity, like they knew each other but weren’t friends. Still, I thought maybe Lawrence would extend a hand, but he didn’t, and this Trimble guy didn’t either.

  “When he got hit,” Trimble said, “at least it didn’t break his cell phone. When we heard it ringing inside his jacket, I grabbed it. What was he doing here?”

  Lawrence looked over at the dead body of Miles Diamond. “He and I were watching different stores, thinking they might get hit. I guess his did.”

  Trimble pursed his lips, nodded. “You friends?”

  “We each threw each other a bit of work. He was a good guy. He’s got a wife.”

  “I’ve seen her,” Trimble said, grinning. “He was a lucky guy till now. Who’s this?” he asked, tilting his head toward me.

  “Zack Walker. He writes for The Metropolitan.”

  “Hi,” I said. Trimble glared at me briefly, then said to Lawrence, “What’s he doing, a piece on guys who couldn’t hack it on the force?”

  Lawrence ran his hand over his mouth, like he was going to have to physically keep his comments to himself. He slipped his hand into his pocket and said, “Do you know what happened here, Steve?”

  “Mr. Diamond appears to be the victim of a hit-and-run. We got a witness, guy walking his dog, about a block away, said this black SUV was backing out of Maxwell’s here after taking out the front of the store, and squashed our guy here. He must have got out of his car—that’s it parked over there—I don’t know, but he woulda been better off staying put.”

  “So they ran him down,” Lawrence said. A vein I’d not noticed before was pulsing at the side of his head.

  Trimble shook his head slowly. “Not sure. The dog walker, he said Miles was behind the SUV, one of those big tall ones, you know, and he was so short, they just might not have seen him when they were backing up. These SUVs, they should all go beep-beep when they back up, like trucks, you know?”

  3

  My daughter Angie was at the kitchen table, ignoring the buttered toast I’d put in front of her and fiddling with one of her nails instead, when her cell phone started chirping. She dug it out of her purse, looked at the display, and said, “Shit, my stalker.”

  I made some coffee. I really needed some coffee. It had been nearly five o’clock when I’d fallen into bed, and even then I’d had a hard time sleeping. I’d nodded off around six, and now it was eight, and I’d been up half an hour, so do the math. I was hoping coffee would help, but was not particularly hopeful.

  All I wanted to do was crawl back into bed, but it had been my plan originally to head into the paper with Sarah when she went in, and this particular week that happened to be around eight-thirty.

  “I can’t believe he’s calling me this early,” Angie said. “Bad enough having a stalker. I have to get an early-bird stalker.” The phone had rung six, seven times now, but I’d lost track, since I was counting out eight spoonfuls of fine-grind Colombian into the coffeemaker. Finally, the ringing stopped. “Now he’ll leave me a message,” she sighed, brushing back some of the blond locks that had fallen across her face.

  Her brother Paul, who at sixteen is two years younger than Angie, had his back to her as he looked into the fridge, but he’d been listening. “Five bucks says he phones the house next,” he said as he struggled to get a yogurt from the back of the fridge without moving the milk and pickles and orange juice that blocked the way.

  Angie took one bite of her cold toast. “Last night he phoned me five times. I never did answer it. So then I have to listen to all his creepy messages. ‘How are you? I was just thinking about you. Why don’t you give me a call? Do you want to get together?’ Uh, I don’t think so.”

  Paul, his head still in the fridge, said, “You’re so hard on everybody.”

  I spilled the last spoonful of coffee before I could get it into the filter, and scooped it to the edge of the counter and into my other hand. I went to toss it into the wastebasket we keep under the sink, when I noticed a glass bottle sitting on top. It was an empty Snapple bottle that earlier, according to the label, had had apple juice in it. “Hey,” I said. “Who’s tossing Snapple bottles in the regular garbage?”

  Angie was still shaking her head over her unwanted phone call and Paul was peeling off the top of the yogurt container. I glared at him. He was the one who liked apple juice.

  “We have a recycling box,” I reminded everyone, taking out the Snapple bottle, which had its metal cap screwed back on it. “Glass bottles, tin cans, plastic—that all goes into the box, not into the garbage. Are we interested in saving the planet or not?”

  “I could go either way,” Angie said.

  “Is there, like, some Most Irritated Dad contest going on we don’t know about?” Paul asked.

  “I didn’t get home till five,” I said.

  Paul, putting on his concerned face and adopting his mock-parent voice, said, “Maybe if you got to bed in good time, you wouldn’t be so grumpy in the morning.”

  I ignored that and walked through the kitchen to the small alcove by the back door, where we keep the blue plastic baskets that hold glass and cans and newspapers for the recycling pickup. I dropped the Snapple container into the one reserved for bottles and cans, making it the only item there.

  Sarah was coming into the kitchen as I returned, and Paul was bringing her up to speed. “Angie has a stalker.”

  Sarah said, “Huh?”

  “The thing is,” Paul said, “I think Angie actually likes him. He’s mysterious.”

  “Fuck you,” Angie said to her brother.

  “Hey,” I said. “Come on.”

  Sarah let out a breath. “You got coffee going?” she asked me. I pointed.

  Paul said, “And Dad’s in training for the Irritable Olympics. Those are our main headlines this morning.”

  “Two days ago,” Angie said, “I run into him at Starbucks. I’m there with my friends, we’re getting ready to go, and he walks in, like he’s my best friend, and he’s Mr. Oh-So-Perfect Gentleman, helping me on with my coat, handing me my purse.”

  “Who are we talking about?” Sarah asked. Good question, I thought. I might have gotten around to it eventually. A trained journalist, that’s me.

  “Trevor Wylie,” she said. The name didn’t register with me immediately. Switching gears, Angie said, “Am I going to be able to get a car tonight?”

  After waiting in line behind Sarah, I poured mys
elf a cup of coffee, added some cream, spooned in two sugars. Sarah already had that morning’s Metropolitan in her hand and was scanning the front-page headlines, looking to see whether any of the stories she’d promoted at the newsroom’s budget meeting the night before had made it to the front page.

  “I don’t believe it,” she said. “They didn’t put the dead skateboarder on front. How many sixty-year-old skateboarders are there? He was sixty. That’s what makes it news. Assholes.”

  “Hello?” Angie said. “I need a car tonight? Is anyone there?”

  Sarah looked over her paper at me, and I looked at her. Without actually saying anything, we had entered consultation mode. We were asking each other, Do you need a car? And are we going to let her have a car?

  “Why do you need a car?” Sarah asked.

  Angie sighed, the I-told-you-this-before sigh, and said, “Remember, I’ve got all these evening lectures, and it’s a lot easier, and safer, coming home if I’ve got the car instead of taking the subway.”

  “Oh yeah,” said Sarah.

  “I mean, you’re the ones who freak out about me taking the subway at night, so if you don’t want me to get raped, you should let me have the car.”

  No pressure there.

  Our kitchen phone rang. “That’ll be him,” Paul said. “Betcha anything. He figures your cell is off or something.”

  “Don’t answer it!” Angie said.

  Paul looked over at our wall-mounted phone so he could read the call display. How he could see it from where he stood, without binoculars, was beyond me. “Shit, nope. I was wrong.”

  Now that Paul was satisfied this call was not Angie’s stalker, he made no moves to actually answer the phone.

  “So who is it?” Sarah snapped.

  “Paper,” Paul said.

  “Could you get it?” Sarah said, considering that Paul was two steps away while his mother was on the other side of the kitchen.

  I took a long sip of coffee, let the warmth run down my throat. Caffeine, do your thing.

  Paul grabbed the receiver. “Yeah? Sec.” He handed the phone to his mother—“I told you it was for you,” he said—as she strode across the hardwood kitchen floor, the newspaper scrunched into one hand.

  “I was sure it was going to be him,” Angie said, her body relaxing as though she’d dodged a bullet.

  “Who is this guy again?” I asked her. “Who’s phoning you?”

  “I just told you.”

  “Tell me again. I wasn’t taking notes earlier.”

  “Trevor Wylie.”

  “Isn’t that Paul’s old friend? The one with the zits?”

  “You gotta be kidding me,” Sarah said into the receiver. “I filled in for him last night. He’s still sick?”

  “You’re thinking of Trey Wilson,” Paul said defensively. “He’s the one with a face looked like a pizza. Trevor Wylie’s got a very pretty face, doesn’t he, Angie?”

  “Shut up. He wouldn’t even know me if he wasn’t running errands for you.”

  “What errands?” I asked.

  “He showed up at our high school end of last year,” Paul said, ignoring the question. “He’s this total loner kid, with the long trenchcoat, thinks he’s Keanu Reeves from The Matrix. Even wears the shades. Speaks in two-word sentences. Must have flunked a couple of times, like, he must be twenty. Moved from out west or something, don’t even think he has any parents. Like, out here. And he’s a total computer nut, and he’s helped me totally reformat my computer.”

  “He’s twenty and still at high school?”

  “Last year. If he goes to college next year, maybe he’ll pick Mackenzie, and he and Angie can commute together.”

  Angie gave him her best death stare.

  “And why didn’t they use the skateboarder on page one? Who’s idiotic call was that?” Sarah wanted to know.

  “So, is he dangerous, this guy?” I said, sipping some more coffee. I was trying to be casual about it, working to keep the panic out of my voice.

  “He’s fine,” Angie said.

  “I mean, I don’t think he’s going to shoot up the school or anything,” Paul said, thinking that I’d find that reassuring. “But he really is a computer genius. I think he spends his spare time inventing viruses. You know when the Hong Kong stock market or something crashed? I think he did that. And the MyDoom virus? I’m betting that was him. His dad’s some software king, makes bazillions of dollars, but now that Trevor’s living on his own, I’m guessing this is his way to get back at his old man, to cripple the Internet or something.”

  “Where do you get this information?” I asked.

  Paul shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  Sarah hung up. “I have to stay late again tonight. I’ve got to run the meeting again. Bailey’s still gone.” Bailey was her boss, the city editor. “I was hoping to get tonight off, since they’ve got me going to this retreat later in the week.”

  “Retreat?” I said.

  “Maybe I should write everything down for you,” Sarah said. “You know, department heads, other management types from circulation and advertising, we all get together off-site and brainstorm about how to make the paper better and how we can all work as a team, improve employee relations, make everyone feel part of the process, and we draft some list of goals, then come back to the paper and forget it ever happened.”

  “Does that mean I can’t get the car?” Angie said. “I have to have a car.”

  We only had the one, an aging Toyota Camry. Before we moved back into the city, from Oakwood, we had a second car. Out in the suburbs, where there were no subways or decent bus lines, you couldn’t survive with just one vehicle. But our Honda Civic came to a grisly end one night (Sarah and I very nearly did as well, but that’s a long story, and I’ve already told it), and we opted not to replace it once we’d sold our house and returned to our old neighborhood.

  We bought a house a few doors down from our former one, on Crandall, a couple of blocks from the subway and connecting streetcars, and we’d been managing with one car for some time now. Paul’s high school was within walking distance, but in the last few weeks Angie had started college, in town, and, as she’d just reminded us, a few of her classes were in the evening. That meant a walk of several blocks in the dark to catch the subway home, and Sarah was almost as paranoid as I on this issue. We wanted Angie walking alone at night as little as possible.

  “What time do you finish?” Sarah asked.

  Angie thought. “Eight? Eight-thirty?”

  Sarah said, “You take the car, swing by the paper on the way home and pick me up.”

  “Then I can’t hang out with anyone after,” Angie said. “I was thinking of getting a coffee with someone after the lecture.”

  “Who?”

  “Someone. I don’t know.” She got all sullen. “Anybody.”

  Which of course meant someone in particular. Sarah said, “You want a car, you pick me up.”

  “Jeez, fine, I’ll pick you up. I just won’t make any friends at college at all. I’ll go to school, come home, leave it to the people who live on campus to have lives.”

  I wanted to steer the conversation in another direction, not only because I hated family arguments, but because my head was pounding. “What’s the class tonight?” I asked.

  “Some psych-sociology male/female studies thing,” she said. “I have to do some research paper for, like, ten days from now. About why men are so weird.”

  “Interview your father,” Sarah offered.

  “And I need five dollars for parking,” Angie said.

  Sarah sidled up to me as she put in some toast. I said to her, quietly, “Maybe it’s time to think about getting another car.”

  “I can’t have this discussion now,” she said.

  “We’re having these kinds of problems every day,” I said.

  I squeezed out of the way as she got some strawberry jam out of the fridge. This kitchen was about half the size of the one in our house out in the sub
urbs, and quarters were close. “We can’t afford another car now,” Sarah said. “We’ve got Angie’s tuition, a mortgage—”

  The phone rang again. I grabbed it instinctively, not thinking to look at who the caller was, and already had the receiver in my hand when Angie started to shout “Don’t answer it!”

  But she cut herself off as I brought the phone to my ear, the mouthpiece exposed. Angie mouthed to me, “I’m not here!”

  “Hello?” I said. At this point, I looked at the call display and saw “Unknown name/Unknown number.”

  “Hi. Is Angie there?” Very cool. You could almost tell, over the phone, that he had to be wearing sunglasses.

  “Can I take a message?” I said.

  “Is she there?”

  “Can I take a message?” I repeated.

  A pause at the other end. “Who’s this?”

  Now I paused. “This is her father.”

  Angie raised her hands up, rolled her eyes, mouthed, “Jeez!”

  “Oh,” he said. “You wrote that book.”

  That caught me off guard. “Yeah, I did. I wrote a few.”

  “SF stuff.”

  “That’s right.”

  “About the missionaries.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “I like that kind of shit. You see The Matrix movies?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “First one was great, the other two sucked ass.”

  I said, “Do you want to leave a message for Angie?”

  Angie, in a loud, angry whisper: “I. Am. Not. Here!”

  “Tell her Trevor called.” And he hung up.

  “God,” I said, taken aback by the abrupt end to our conversation. “What an asshole.”

  “What did he want?” Angie said. “What were you talking about?”

  “He was asking if I’d seen The Matrix, and if I was the guy who wrote that book, about missionaries.”

  “Did he say anything about me?”

  “Just wanted me to tell you he called. You think he read my book?”

  Paul, finishing his yogurt, said to Angie, “I think he wants to enter your matrix.”

  Angie gave him the finger. On her way out of the kitchen she said again that she needed five dollars to pay for parking at Mackenzie that evening. Sarah dug a bill out of her purse and handed it over.